Friday, August 26, 2005

now thats a lawsuit i can stand behind

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and four California citys are sueing federal developmental agencys for not complying with EPA standards when financing foreign projects. This is a great move, polution affects (or is it effects?) the entire planet. We cant force other nations to try to save the environment but if this goes through we will force companies to follow our guidlines if they want american money. first off there is only one reason any company exists, to make money. thats it, claim anything you want but really thats it. So we cannot expect the companys to help the environment on there own. so companies are earth friendly thats because they are going for the pockets of the environmentalists. if everyone agreed to only buy products that were safe for the environment then yes the companies would change to meet that demand. But most people are more concerned with putting food on the table than saving the world. I can understand this. that is why the government must step forward and protect the environment. the problem here is that bush has been notorius for folling back environmental protection. Houston, i think, was named the most polluted city in the US while Bush was govenor. he grandfathered the dirtiest powerplants so that they wouldnt have to do costly upgrades to meet modern standards. Bush is more concerned with corprate profit, i mean "the economy" than protecting future generations. they dump tons of money into hydrogen technology that is one of the least practical ways of making cleaner cars, and it will take many years so he can put in this token effort and no one really expects any change. it wouldnt take a whole lot of effort to make cars run on alcohol, my backround is in race cars, running on alky does have draw backs it gets about half the mileage of gas because the stoiciometric ratio is around 8 to 1 as apposed to gas which is around 15 to 1. But once the infastructre was inplace, which would be minor changes vs. what we would have to do for hydrogen. yes cars would need some changes to run on alky but nothing they couldnt solve in a few years. But we would be supporting ammerican farmers instead of foriegn coutries which is something the conservatives should love. then run the diesels on biodiesel which is what they were originally designed to run on by Otto Von Diesel all those years ago. im not sure of the pollution levels for alky but biodiesels have fewer emisions than regular deisel and nothing needs to be done to the truck. so anyway i always seem to fall into talking about the alcohol and biodiesel when i get into the environmental issues because i am a car guy and these changes could help alot of problems, not a permanent solution but a much better answer than what we have now. so if you want the future generations to have a planet to live on lets all work towards these simple changes and then move on from there.